where’s the microwave? an update from the sea.

When you woke up this morning you no doubt sought out a few things.  First you probably went looking for a bathroom where you were able to relieve yourself of the wastewater that had collected in your bladder through the night.  Next, you meandered about, splashing water on your face and sticking brushes in your mouth, perhaps you even went so far as to call warm water to life with the touch of a finger, sudsing away the slow of morning from your bright little eyes.

For breakfast you most likely got something on the fly or had a bowl of cereal while watching television and checking your email.  On the way to work or whatever your next destination may be your cell phone probably rang as you shifted from “park” to “drive” and you answered it immediately and conveniently while your car took you wherever you needed to go.

Once you arrived at your destination you probably used a computer, communicating almost accidentally with a variety of people as you went about your daily tasks.   You may have eaten lunch in a nice little sandwich shop where they serve Chi Lattes and iced mocha frap’s.  Maybe the Chicken-Caesar sandwich was on rye bread and laid out for you on a well-designed table that was held inside a room that’s temperature and humidity were monitored for your convenience.

Upon returning home perhaps you cooked yourself dinner after watching some television or heading to the gym.  Maybe you are a super busy person and you only had time to microwave the leftovers from “Tai Tai Chicken Hut” before you ran out to grab a Margarita with your girlfriends or a whiskey with the boys.

Eventually it time to sleep in a bed built to fit your body and your style. Surrounding you are things designed to make your life easier, electronic gadgets and sheets, pillows and clocks, again all of this is probably contained in a room designed to keep you running at your optimal personal operating temperature which you can set with a dial located at nipple height somewhere in the room.  Ah, finally you can close your eyes, think sweet nothings, and nod off to sleep in your own personal refrigerator.

Waking up on a boat is a little bit different. 

The primary reason for this is that instead of your environment being designed around your needs, you must suit your needs around those of the environment.  You will wake up wherever the boat has room for you to lay down, much like a piece of luggage will wake up in whatever airplane a handler decides to throw it in. 

In my case, this often involves being woken up by the sun around 6:45 am because the sun has recently decided to change my optimal personal operating temperature from something comfortable to something more closely related to a cook-top.   Where the boat can fit me might be in one of the bunks or births below deck that have been closely designed to fit a standard piece of human luggage. Sadly I am 1.4 times larger than the average piece of human luggage, resulting in a rather tight fit.

After waking I often have little need to relieve the wastewater collected in my bladder because it has drained out of my pours during the night, leaving me dehydrated and damp.  Instead of checking the television or my email for entertainment I will check the barometric-pressure, which has been holding steady at about 30.5 for a week or two but this morning is dropping rapidly.

For breakfast I will proceed to drink about two liters of water in an attempt to replace what has been lost during the night and then if I am at sea I will climb on deck, jump backwards over the lifelines that wrap my ship in theoretical safety, and crash into the water swimming away the slow of morning.  When my head is cleared I will eat some Civiche or other protein followed by a bowl of frosted flakes to be ingested with my Indiana Jones Adventure Spoon, that is now available standard with any box of Kellog’s Frosted Flakes.  Before I can enjoy the cereal though I have to find the milk, which has no doubt sank three feet down to the bottom of the ice-box.  As I stick my hand inside and feel around in the cool dark for the milk’s container plastic container (adventure spoon in hand,) I have the crazy thoughts of what life might be like living inside of a refrigerator.

Breakfast complete I am now concerned with one of two things.  Either A.  Getting the boat wherever it needs to go or B. Reloading it with whatever supplies might be needed to make it to wherever it may be headed next.  This is not to say that such a life doesn’t leave room for adventure, quite the contrary, but adventures will be covered in another addition and so for the time being we will stick to general life.

If sailing, it seems self-explanatory that my tasks involve not running aground, tipping the boat over, getting lost, or drowning in a storm.  If on land I am for the most part limited to my legs, which often leads to more creative forms of transportation such as hitchhiking, horse and buggies, cabs, or the borrowing of derelict bikes from time to time to get myself to a grocery store and restock the boat for the next leg of it’s journey.

After three or for days at sea, the list usually looks something like this:

6 cans vegetables

9 chicken breasts

1 box saltines

8 cans of tuna fish (solid white albacore in water)

2 loaves bread

3lbs sliced turkey

1 box of rice

1 box pasta

1 gallon of milk

3 limes

4 blocks of ice
1 bag baby carrots

2 bags of ice

1 gallon of rum

3 bottles of wine

1 box cereal

Fruit

6 Yogurt cups

8 gallons of water

This list is sufficient to keep three grown men running for 3-4 days.  Breakfast consists of cereal, yogurt, fruit, or oatmeal.  Lunch consists of sandwiches and carrots.  Snacks are made up of cans of tuna eaten with crackers (put some old bay on it, it has a lot of protein) and dinner is primarily chicken, rice, and a vegetable or beans.  Breakfast is usually put together by whomever isn’t driving or navigating at the time, and so is lunch.  Dinner is normally prepared by myself, as I seem to be the only one capable of producing edible meals using only one medium sauce-pan, a wooden spoon, a 1 foot propane grill, a  two  burner stove, a variety of seasoning, a sauté pan, garlic, and olive oil.  The hardest part really, is keeping things from charring on the outside, as both methods of heating food only have two settings, “off” and “explosion.”  In the beginning  this often led to looking for an easier way, a microwave I told myself, If I only had a microwave.

While under way shifts are taken for the driving, while in one’s off time one may have a few options.  My personal favorite is doing nothing, but otherwise you can play guitar, write, sleep, drink more water, or work out.  Working out is a necessity while under way for days at a time to keep yourself in any kind of shape.  This may be a direct correlation to the 3 bottles of wine and 1 gallon of rum consumed on the 3 day average, however those are none negotiable, so working out it is.  Besides sleeping in relatively tight quarters when you’re not a relatively small animal, requires stretching from time to time.

Doing things like “conducting interviews” or “looking for a job” on a boat might be considered a bit more complicated, as one cannot speak with possible employers via VHF radios.  Also, the idea of meeting people at any given point in time or in any given place is almost impossible to predict as you do not control the elements, and the simple task of staying on top of things such as political events, world tragedies, email, or girlfriends that  like to be spoken to, can be almost impossible. 

Oh but I am not complaining.  I came to be at the will of variables, I came to not communicate, I came to adjust to something else, and now I am beginning to wonder if I will be able to adjust back.  As the last hundred miles of the coast begin to disappear I begin to wonder if I can make it to the little specks of land blotted across the southern portions of my charts.  I begin to wonder if I can jump from one to the next and all the way down to South America.  I begin to wonder if it is even worth coming back to my cellular phones and refrigerators and hot showers.  

It is easy to feel like this when things are going well.  Much like Sunday morning next to a beautiful girl.  But waking up to a thunderstorm pouring water through an open hatch and onto your head, and then having to lock the boat air tight in 92 degree heat while you roll in the sea at night, is a bit like waking up alone the day after you realized you left someone behind that you won’t be getting back.

So here we are in our day to day, waiting for an eastern wind and contemplating what comes next.  It has been pretty simple so far, the crew amusing itself with sarcasm and poorly written jokes, up to this point we had a map, a plan.  I haven’t made any public appearances for margaritas, I don’t know what most of my friends or family are doing, and I have no idea what I am going to do with my life. 

But I have finally stopped looking for a microwave, and for now, that is just fine.